The current practice of intravenous medication infusion often involves a relatively complicated process of assembling several sterile parts and performing appropriate dosing calculations. Further, where more refined dosing is required or desired, expensive electronic infusion pumps are often utilized. Infusion pumps offer certain advantages, but drawbacks include cost, the need for a power source, maintenance requirements, susceptibility to adverse environmental conditions, and perhaps most importantly, require requisite knowledge to use safely and effectively. There are several circumstances where less expensive yet automated intravenous infusion systems are ideal.
Intravenous infusions are now more commonly performed in prehospital settings where smaller, lighter, and self-powered systems enjoy a distinct advantage. In the prehospital setting, equipment storage space is minimal, power may be nonexistent, and equipment must be portable and able to withstand the elements. Yet, emerging data suggests that early prehospital use of certain medications may improve outcome. For example, the early administration of Progestins may improve patient clinical outcome following traumatic brain injury and stroke. Progestins, however, must be infused over a significant duration and should be started early. This ideal window exists at a time when a single paramedic is responsible for performing multiple tasks to stabilize the patient, limiting the time available to manage an intravenous medication system.
Furthermore, administering intravenous medication in other prehospital settings, such as military environments, produces still greater challenges. In addition to the difficulties encountered above, personnel may be scarce, and patients can suddenly and frequently outnumber trained clinical staff. In some locations, the highest level of immediate care is quite commonly a field medic. Further, calamitous events such as natural disasters, war, and insurrection may displace a vast number of people and commonly degrade, destroy, and overwhelm the local hospital system, making medication infusion using standard pumps impossible.
Yet, developing a viable portable intravenous system poses challenges. Infusion pumps are typically too complicated and expensive to dedicate for use with a single medication or make disposable. Traditional pre-packaged and sealed medical and surgical kits have limitations. For example, medications are commonly required in kits, and when a medication's shelf life expires, a typical kit is no longer useful for patient care and frequently must be destroyed. This practice is expensive, wasteful, and presents logistical burden of accounting for and managing medical waste.
Therefore, what is needed is a relatively small, portable, self-contained, and self-powered system which can reliably deliver an intravenous infusion safely and effectively. What is further needed is a kit which contains medications permitting more rapid setup and delivery of an intravenous system, while allowing medications to be inspected and replaced without exposing the remainder of the kit.